There's a certain Slant of light

Literary critic Helen Vendler has noted in Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries that "Despair" was commonly known in the 19th century as one of two sins that could prevent someone from entering Heaven, the other being "Presumption.

"[1] With Vendler's interpretation, Dickinson conceptualizes this religious Despair, the ultimate loss of hope, to what one feels at the onset of winter by connecting abstract terms to sensory details, such as "Slant of light" to "Heavenly Hurt" and "Shadows" to "the look of Death.

[9] Besides describing the afternoon light and the indirect nature of the poem's discussion of death, Thomas H. Johnson has also noted that the term "slant" can have a mocking tone when defined as an oblique reflection or gibe.

[10][failed verification] Thus the light and the heavenly hurt it causes may be interpreted as mocking, much like man's awareness of the irreversible Fall to mortality, which is the ultimate despair, especially if redemption is not an option.

[11] The pathos of the landscape and shadows waiting to disappear when the already slanting light is finally gone parallels how despair reduces spiritual hope.

Scholar Sharon Cameron, however, notes in Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of Genre that the poem enacts both of these impressions, expressing how interior changes may be invisible, but they are affected by the visible, exterior world.

[12] In the original manuscript of "There's a certain Slant of light," stored at Harvard's Houghton Library, the em-dashes at the end of certain lines are not prominent.

[5] Donald E. Thackrey referred to "There's a certain Slant of light" as one of Dickinson's best lyric poems for its force of emotion but resistance to definitive statements on meaning.

[17] Critic Yvor Winters claims in In Defense of Reason that it is amongst three of Dickinson's most successful poems, alongside "A Light exists in Spring" and "As imperceptibly as grief.

Canadian rock band The Tea Party has a song on their 1993 album Splendor Solis titled A Certain Slant of Light.